Some news from the world of capitalism: various maths people have things you can spend money on. Our roving reporters investigate.
Maths Inspiration, a maths theatre show which has been touring the country for a few years providing large-scale theatre shows for GCSE and A-Level students, has now released a set of DVDs of a special series of talks, which were filmed earlier this year.
Math Munch is a groovy website run by three groovy people from the USA. Imagine this site, but less presumptuous about your mathematical schooling and run to a strict weekly schedule. Each week’s post contains a few links to interesting maths things and an interview with a person of mathematical interest, all on a chosen theme. They’ve been running a sharing campaign for the past few weeks to try to attract more people to their site; since I’ve been enjoying Math Munch for quite a while now, I thought I’d help out with the campaign and point you towards it.
Recent posts have talked about tilings, Temari balls, map projections, and Yang Hui’s triangle (better known as Pascal’s). The writing is designed to inspire an interest in maths in anyone of any age. So even if you’re one of the super-cool people who sends corrections in to this site when we get an off-by-one error in a complicated equation, it’s good to know about Math Munch – the next time a friend or relative asks you where they can find interesting maths that they’ll be able to understand, you can point them thither.
[vimeo url=https://vimeo.com/70587267]
Time tilings by Pablo Valbuena
via NotCot.org
Vuoristo coffee table by Fabien Barrero+Carsenat. Nice conic sections!
[youtube url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQtJMOAsjdA]
Over on Google+, David Roberts just posted this trailer (via Антид Ото) to a lovely documentary about Julia Robinson and her contributions towards answering Hilbert’s tenth problem.
[youtube url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4x9XKNAYjU]
David Hilbert’s tenth problem was to find an algorithm to solve diophantine equations, that is, to find roots of polynomials with integer coefficients. We now know that the problem is unsolvable in general, and Julia Robinson did a lot of the work to get there; she wrote that she “couldn’t bear to die without knowing the answer.”
David asked if anyone knows of any present-day female mathematicians of similar standing to Julia Robinson. Apart from President of the IMU Ingrid Daubechies and people who are active on Twitter my knowledge of top mathmos is quite poor, so I thought I’d open the question up to The Aperiodical’s readers.
The full DVD of Julia Robinson and Hilbert’s Tenth Problem is available from George Csicsery’s ZALA Films site, and it looks like there are a few copies on Amazon as well.
Hello. My name’s Christian Perfect and I have some maths links for you.
Brad Neely, a member in good standing of my list of male role-models, once made a show called China, IL. Here’s a clip.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r086uma9HBM
Mathematicians like to tell non-mathematicians (and themselves) that real maths isn’t like that; real maths is about seeing the structure behind the numbers and using pure logic to deduce true statements with enormous explanatory power. The platonic ideal of doing real maths involves going for a wander in your brain and then writing down a few of the true statements you saw along the way. But it almost never works out that way: you often have to start out by sitting down and crunching numbers, like any school-age chump, until you get a glimpse of what’s going on. Worse, sometimes it turns out that finishing the theory involves a reduction to cases, a.k.a. Yet More Crunching.
So, this one goes out to the number crunchers. Let these stories of quixotic computation give you solace.
